Dying Memories Read online

  The connection went dead with Roberson disconnecting the call from his end. Bill stared at his cell phone for a long moment before tossing it onto the seat next to him, then wondering what bug had crawled up Roberson’s ass. Something wasn’t quite right there either, but that had been true with just about everything the last two days. Ever since his abduction the world had seemed to be spinning off-kilter.

  Traffic was lighter than he thought it would be as he approached Post Office Square. He drove slowly past the forty-story office building where Gail Hawes had shot large holes out of Kent Forster. Now, six days later and it was as if the incident had never happened. All evidence of the murder had been scrubbed cleaned, the police markings gone, people going about their business as if nothing had ever happened. There was no makeshift memorial left on the scene. Nothing to hint that a man recently had his life violently ended there.

  Bill kept driving until he was able to find a parking spot on Milk Street, then waited several minutes by his car to make sure he wasn’t followed before heading back to One Post Office Square.

  Chapter 28

  The office for Kent Forster’s hedge fund was located on the thirty-eighth floor, and just like the area around the sidewalk where Forster had been gunned down, the office displayed no signs that its founder had recently been murdered. The receptionist manning the front desk was a sleek, twenty-something blonde who looked as perfectly put together as a runway model. She eyed Bill carefully as he approached her and when he showed his press credentials she made a face as if she’d just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk.

  “Another parasite sniffing for blood,” she said, her lips forming a half-sneer.

  “Is that nice?” Bill asked. “You don’t even know me.”

  “We had enough of your kind trying to dig up whatever dirt they can on Kent,” she said, her half-sneer turning to a full one. “Let me save you the trouble, no one here is about to talk to you about Kent, so you might as well leave now.”

  Bill leaned forward against her desk, flashing her a wolfish grin. “You know you’re beautiful when you sneer.”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  “As charming and delightful as you appear on first impression, I’m presently engaged in a relationship, so regretfully I have to decline your offer.”

  She stared at him full on as if she were trying to bore holes through him. “Leave now or I’ll have you physically removed,” she said, frigidly.

  Bill straightened up, all business as he told her, “I’m not here to ask about Mr. Forster, but about the hedge fund. How you operate, who you’re invested in, particularly whether ViGen Corporation is one of your investments.”

  She was about to say something, and from her expression Bill could tell it was going to be along the lines of, ‘I don’t care what you’re here for, leave! ’, but a phone call stopped her. She picked up the receiver and listened without saying anything. When she looked back at Bill her sneer was gone, replaced by a brittleness about her eyes and mouth. She apologized and asked Bill to repeat what he wanted. He did, and she timidly glanced away from him, telling him that she would see if she could find someone who could answer his questions, then asked if he could take a seat. Bill did so. She got on the phone and after a quick conversation told Bill that someone would be out to speak to him in just a few minutes.

  Bill sat waiting, watching her growing nervousness. He stood up and told her he’d be back later. She got halfway out of her chair, alarmed, asking him to please wait and that someone would be right with him.

  Bill hurried out of there. He glanced behind to see her reaching frantically for her phone. Then he was in the elevator and heading down to the street. Once the elevator reached the lobby, he was running fast to get out of the building.

  He was half a block away when he saw a large behemoth in a gray suit and dark shades making a beeline for the main entrance. The behemoth was the same clean-shaven thug from the day before. The left side of his forehead looked badly bruised, the area a nasty purple color, his face set in a dour expression. The thug stopped suddenly to reach into his pocket and pull out a cell phone. Bill quickened his pace and turned the corner onto Water Street before flattening himself against the side of the building. From there he watched the thug.

  The thug’s conversation was short, lasting less than half a minute. After his cell phone was put away, he turned from the entranceway and peered in all directions, his mouth now squeezed into a tiny angry oval. At one point it seemed as if he was staring directly at Bill, but then he looked away and stormed off in the direction from where he had come. Bill watched as the thug got into the passenger seat of a waiting Mercedes sedan, and then as the car drove away. Bill tried reading the license plate but it was too far for him to make it out. The windows were tinted too darkly for him to get a good look at the driver.

  This answered whether or not there was a connection between Kent Forster and his abduction, with both seemingly connected to ViGen. The receptionist’s sudden skittishness warned him that something was up, that they were only trying to delay him. He wondered briefly what would’ve happened if he were still in that office on the 38th floor and that ox-sized thug showed up, and a cold chill caused him to shiver. He stood silently for several minutes as he made sure the Mercedes sedan didn’t perform a reconnaissance of the area, then he made his way quickly down to Milk Street and where he had left his loaner car.

  They probably suspected that he had ditched his car; at the very least they had to be suspicious of why their planted GPS tracking device showed that his car was nowhere in the area. They’d find out soon enough he had left his at an auto dealership and they’d know then that he was driving something else.

  Soon they’d be staking out his parking lot at work to find out what he was now driving. Or if they really wanted, they’d grab him instead of bothering to bug his car again. Whatever he wandered into, it was serious. They had already killed two men, and it looked like they were targeting him to be their third victim. Bill felt a tightness in his chest and began hyperventilating. It probably lasted less than a minute, but it seemed much longer than that before he was able to breathe normally again.

  He wasn’t going to be able to go back to the office, at least not for now. He had a fleeting thought that maybe he should just get lost somewhere in the Midwest until this blew over, then he sat back, grimfaced, a slow anger burning his skin. He wasn’t going to run. Whatever it was, he was going to figure it out and then expose those murderous sons of bitches. As he sat in his loaner car thinking things over, his anger bled away as he realized he didn’t really have any choice on the matter. Dropping his investigation wasn’t an option; at this point it wouldn’t stop them. Going to the police wasn’t an option either, at least it wasn’t until he had something concrete to give them. And even if he wanted to he couldn’t run away from this and get lost somewhere in the middle of the country now that he had Emily in his life. Whatever he had stepped in, it was too late for him to turn back.

  Chapter 29

  The professors and staff members over at MIT that Bill talked to didn’t know whether Tim Zhang had done any work for ViGen Corporation. None of them had even heard of the company, at least that was what they claimed. “Terrible what happened to Tim,” a very thin but attractive woman professor of Pakistani descent volunteered. She had the office next to the late Tim Zhang. She hesitated before adding that Zhang had acted oddly for several weeks before his death.

  “How do you mean odd?”

  She squinted in concentration, thin lines grooving her forehead. “Jumpy,” she said after some thought. “I was walking with him one day and a student behind us dropped a book. The noise startled Tim so much that I thought the poor man was going to have a heart attack.” She sighed, a sad smile turning up her thin lips. “He was such an absent-minded goofball, a really good-hearted man, but those last few weeks he became so quiet and jumpy. Something was bothering him.”

  She didn’t say it, but Bill could see what
she was thinking. It was almost as though Tim had had a premonition that he was going to die soon. Bill thanked her, and gave her his cell phone number in case she remembered anything else.

  “Why are you interested in this?” she asked, her eyes scrunching up as she stared at Bill. “This happened so long ago.”

  Bill shook his head and told her he wasn’t sure, which was only partly true. As he was leaving the MIT campus Jack O’Donnell called to remind him that they had a two o’clock staff meeting in ten minutes.

  “I’m going to have to bow out.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said, a touch of petulance in his voice. “I want you at that meeting.”

  “I can’t be there,” Bill told him. “I’m tracking down leads, and it might be a few days or longer before I’m back in the office. I’ll call later and you can fill me in, and don’t worry, I’ll be sending copy over each day.”

  “What leads are you tracking down?” Jack’s tone had suddenly turned ice cold. Bill knew his boss didn’t like the part of his not showing up at the office for any sort of open-ended period of time, especially with the cutbacks that were going on. If he hadn’t been taking the lead on one of the city’s biggest stories, he wouldn’t have been able to get away with it.

  “Too early to tell you. But don’t worry, all will be disclosed soon.”

  He disconnected the call before his boss could argue the matter any further. What he needed next was a coffee shop with Wi-Fi Internet access, and he found one after driving over the Charles River and into Brookline. When he checked his email he found a message from Carol telling him that ViGen was like a ghost, she couldn’t find anything about how they were funded. There was another email message waiting for him with the sender field blank and the subject header: close call today. Bill knew instantly who it was from. He slowly sipped his coffee while a sense of dread took over. Finally he brought up the email message. As he expected it was from his good pal G. The message read:

  My men were outside One Post Office Square and would’ve run interference if you hadn’t gotten out of there in time. It’s probably best if you stay away from your apartment. Ditto, your office. You need to crack ViGen open, and here’s your way of doing it: they’re running illegal human trials. Look for them rounding up homeless, usually at three AM in Cambridge. They use unmarked vans.–yer pal, G.

  Attached to the email was a map that pointed out a location near the Porter Square section of Cambridge that looked like an area under an overpass. Again as with the earlier email, there was no email address provided. Bill sat paralyzed as he reread the email several times, then closed his eyes. If his good pal, G, was telling the truth then he was being watched. Or maybe G’s men were simply staking out Forster’s hedge fund office in case he showed up, like they probably had Roberson’s office the other day. Or maybe G was simply fucking with his head.

  It took several minutes before Bill was able to work up enough strength to reopen his eyes and peer around the coffee shop. If anyone was watching him he couldn’t tell, but he doubted it. When he was younger he developed a strong survival instinct, first so he could survive the bizarre shit from his home life, then later the army. Although he was feeling jittery inside, he had to think his gut would be warning him if he was being followed. He considered getting the FBI involved, but what did he have? Some emails that could’ve been sent by anyone, including himself. Rumors about a biotech company that he couldn’t substantiate. His borderline crazy theory connecting two murders where he had no real proof or evidence.

  He took his laptop with him to the men’s room where he stood by the sink splashing cold water onto his face. When he felt less jittery, he dried his face off, then went back to the table he’d been sitting at earlier and called Carol on her cell phone. He knew by her hushed tone that he was interrupting Jack’s staff meeting. He asked if she could find out if ViGen had been approved for conducting human trials.

  “I’ll look into it,” she said, “but I might not be able to get to it until tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s fine. Whatever you find out, call me instead of emailing. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to check my email again.”

  “Okay. You’re not coming in tomorrow?” Bill heard some rustling that sounded as if Carol had stepped out of the conference room. Then in a hushed whisper, she said with concern, “I don’t think Jack’s too happy you didn’t make today’s staff meeting.”

  “Yeah, well, he’ll get over it.”

  After he got off the phone with Carol, Bill brought up MIT’s website, and tried to match the pictures he took outside of ViGen with the faculty pictures provided by MIT. He found two matches. One was a leading professor in computer science who specialized in simulations and modeling, another in the nanotechnology area. Bill called MIT and was able to get the office hours for both professors. One wasn’t going to be in until the next day, the other not until Friday. He tried getting their home numbers, but the administrative staff members he talked to wouldn’t budge on that. When he called directory assistance, he found both professors had their home numbers unlisted.

  Bill bought himself another coffee, then sat and tried to work out copy for the next day’s edition of the Tribune, mostly bullshit about the superficial similarities between the Gail Hawes’s shooting and Trey Megeet’s. He knew Jack would run it without too much grousing, especially thinking it might open the door for Bill to visit Gail Hawes in lockup. It was a story he could normally pound out in his sleep, but by the time he was halfway done he was mostly just staring into space, paranoia creeping in and paralyzing him. He grabbed his laptop and left the coffee shop, and drove to the same spy shop he had visited earlier that morning. If he was being watched at Post Office Square and they planted bugs in his loaner car, he wouldn’t be able to see Emily again until this was over. He wasn’t going to do anything to put her in harm’s way.

  The same scruffy tattooed sales clerk was on the job, and Bill offered him twenty bucks to check his car for bugs. The clerk raised an eyebrow. “Again?”

  “A different car,” Bill explained.

  “Look, I can sell you the bug detector for two hundred and fifty bucks,” the clerk said. “Just buy the damn thing. You’ll save money in the long run instead of having to keep coming back here and paying me twenty bucks. And when you’re done needing it, you can probably sell it used online for a hundred and fifty.”

  Bill nodded. Even though it had been seven months since Karen broke up with him, the relationship had left him in a financial hole that he’d been slowly digging himself out of, but he had at least that much left on his credit cards before he’d be maxing them out. After he paid for the bug detector, the sales clerk told him he’d show Bill how to use it, then followed Bill out to the loaner car that he had gotten from the dealer. The clerk waved the device over the car and shook his head.

  “It’s clean,” he said. “Too bad. If it had something, I’d show you how to locate it, but it’s pretty easy. You just follow the directions and the display will lead you right to the transmitter. So who’s bugging you?”

  “Hell if I know,” Bill said.

  The tattooed clerk nodded, unconvinced. “For eighty bucks I can sell you a bug jammer. It wouldn’t help if a GPS transmitter is attached to the outside of your car, but it could help keep you from being eavesdropped on.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think I need it.”

  “Your call, chief.” The clerk smiled thinly. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people who buy these detectors are just paranoid fucks. You’re that lucky one out of a hundred who has good reason to be paranoid. Be careful.”

  The clerk turned and headed back to his shop, stopping once to look back at Bill and shake his head.

  With only a little more peace of mind, Bill found another coffee shop that offered Wi-Fi. After loading himself up with some high octane, he sat at the counter and pounded out the rest of his article.

  Chapter 30

  It was three-thirty in the morning a
s Bill lay low in his car with the engine and lights off and watched as a group of homeless lay huddled under an overpass near Porter Square. He’d been there over an hour with no sign of any vans. It was cold in the car and he wished he’d brought a blanket instead of just shivering in his leather bomber jacket. He checked the time again, thought about calling it a night but talked himself into giving it another half hour.

  Earlier that night he’d almost gone back to his own apartment for his video camera, but didn’t want to risk his place being under twenty-four surveillance. Instead he broke into Jeremy’s apartment so he could borrow his friend’s camera instead. Broke in was an accurate way of putting it since he ended up using a skill he had developed as a teenager to pick the lock on Jeremy’s apartment door. He was rusty at it, having not done anything like that in almost twenty years and not having the right tools, but it was a cheap lock, and at two in the morning there wasn’t much risk someone would be passing him in the hallway. As rusty as Bill was it took him only three minutes of fumbling with the lock before he had the door open and was slipping into the apartment. Waiting for him inside was Jeremy’s Persian cat, Augustine, who quickly rubbed against Bill’s leg, purring. Bill picked his little furry buddy up and stroked Augustine while he found Jeremy’s video camera, and after that searched the kitchen cabinet drawers and pocketed a spare key in case he needed to go back there. Later when his friend returned from Italy he’d explain all this to him. Attached by a magnet to the refrigerator were feeding and care instructions for Augustine that Jeremy had left for his neighbor Kate. She must’ve last come in early in the day because the water dish was near empty. Before leaving Bill made sure it was full. He was half tempted to bring Augustine with him. It would’ve been nice to have had the company.